Earlier this year, the buddy cop comedy "Ride Along" with Hart and Ice Cube kicked off with $1.06 million in its Thursday night launch that started at 8 p.m. It scored an impressive $49 million over the long Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend.

Hart's last movie, the rom-com remake "About Last Night," kicked off with $525,000 on its Thursday night debut.

Critics' reviews have been generally worse for the sequel than its predecessor, inspired by the Steve Harvey dating manual "Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man." According to Rotten Tomatoes, about 22% of the reviews have been positive.

When it's hot, as in summertime hot, it can feel like your brain doesn't work right. Which may partly explain why the summer is such a peak season for stupid movies, the sorts of loud, outsized, clanging behemoths that people mean when they typically refer negatively to "Hollywood."

Sixteen years after SpongeBob SquarePants first appeared on television, the yellow animated character made a splash on the big screen this weekend with the release of "The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water."